gestus (just us fish)

Anything that is whole is paradoxical; the elements are in contention.

“The strength of the fish is made for the strength of the water” (title of a sculpture in the lobby of The Rendezous Merry Hotel on Ya Nan Blvd.).

What are we made for? For what is our strength a match?

This. Soulographie.

Gestus – not the difference within but the difference among (among the ideas, images, intentions, points of view). (What I’m getting from Elin Diamond.)

About Soulographie’s images and methods… Daphne Brooks from the intro to Bodies in Dissent:

“Spectacularly ‘eccentric,’ the characters in this book imagined and stylized ways to make their subjugated bodies move more freely by embracing what Carla Peterson calls an ‘empowering oddness.’ In Peterson’s provocative interpretation of the eccentric, the term connotes a ‘double meaning: the first evokes a circle not concentric with another, an axis not centrally placed (according to the dominant system), whereas the second extends the notion of off-centeredness to suggest freedom of movement stemming from the lack of central control and hence new possibilities of difference.’ Working outside constrictive racial and gender paradigms, the figures discussed in Bodies in Dissent rehearsed ‘off-center’ identity formations to disrupt the ways in which they were perceived by audiences and to enact their own ‘freedom dreams.’ Each figure developed a means to move more freely and to be culturally ‘odd,’ to turn the tables on normativity and to employ their own bodies as canvasses of dissent in popular performance culture. Restoring movement and history to individuals in the cultural margins, their unpredictable performances cut through the tyranny of stillness evolving out of the Atlantic world’s dominant racial and gender narratives. Suturing together hybrid and sometimes profane cultural materials to rewrite categories of self-representation, these path-breaking individuals experimented with ways to express their dissonant relationship to dominant culture and plotted ways to subvert that dissonance.”

In Soulographie – perpetrators, survivors, the targets of perpetration, and witnesses are presented through culturally odd means, in order to move them out of conventions of consideration (or of denial), and into paradoxical action (life). We’re looking for an empowering oddness?